scarykitties on 13/9/2011 at 12:27

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I know that this has been explored briefly in the past, but I'm curious if there has been any implementation.

I could imagine it working if a texture had a contact source and humans and Garrett had (separate) receptrons to create an object like a blood splatter that would look like footprints every second or two and then be deleted after 10 to 15 seconds. Garrett's "flootsplatter" would have a suspicious property (or not?) while other humans would not (if you want an explanation for why they would go after Garrett's footprints, maybe they can identify the prints of his high heels or something).

Is there a reason that I'm not thinking of as to why this hasn't been done before (to my knowledge)?

UPDATE:

Alright, I ran a little test. It looks like the only issue with this set-up is that it only registers a contact when I jump onto a texture. Just walking on it doesn't register as contact. Is there any way to change the sensitivity?

NOTE: I'm using city\roof as the texture to test because I couldn't find the vmawwinter texture in the texture list. Incidentally, is there any way to search for textures? They can be damn hard to find in that list.

R Soul on 13/9/2011 at 14:08

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We don't have a way of detecting whether or not an object is moving, and it might be rather tricky to get the footprint objects to face the right direction. Some sort of 'projectile' might work, but as you say, they'd have to delete themselves to prevent object count building up.

When it comes to footsteps being suspicious, in most cases they shouldn't be because they could be from a servant or one of the nobles.

An alternative is to make a texture with loads of footsteps with a transparent background that you can just drop onto the ground, as permanent objects. Those objects could be placed along all major paths.

Texture Browser: get "t2tex" from (http://www.thiefmissions.com/tools/) this page and you can use it to quickly browse all the textures. Right click and select something like 'view image info' to get the texture name. If you have the right custom Dromed menus, you can select 'load single texture' and paste in the family and texture name.

scarykitties on 13/9/2011 at 14:29

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I wouldn't worry too much about sound synchronization.

Unfortunately, the room brush thing won't work because there are no rooms full of snow. it would be strewn naturally around as though windblown, not a solid blanket.

Don't objects created with receptrons inherit the location and direction of the object that creates them (in this case Garrett or the guards)? Shouldn't they then automatically be positioned to face the right direction?

I've got the basic set-up working, as I've described, but my only concern is that simply walking over a texture doesn't trigger the "contact" source unless the player falls or jumps onto it. Maybe that is just because I was using the roof texture, but if not, is there any way I could guarantee that it would count a source stim for footsteps?

scarykitties on 13/9/2011 at 18:03

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Hmm, that's one option.

I'm going to try putting a radius source on the texture. No idea how that will work, but if it goes up high enough to trigger Garrett/AI's receptrons...

scarykitties on 14/9/2011 at 01:20

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Bah. I can't get either thing to work quite right. I can get it to make footprints, but it only works in the center of a brush. If you move away from the center of the brush, it stops making them (unless you expand the radius, I suppose). Damn.

This test also tries out my hopes of having water give you a metaproperty that allows wind to harm you but that is removed if you stand near a heat source. It just doesn't seem to get removed by the heat source and I can't get an ambient in a metaproperty to function right. Bah.

Oh, well. If anyone else wants to give it a try, here's what I've got:

(http://www.4shared.com/file/37QlDf4l/snowtest.html)

I've included what is basically just a bloodstain object that I swapped the texture for some footprints. I actually really like how the footprints look against the snow, though. All the more shame that it doesn't work right.